SECTION – I

FILE MANAGEMENT IN UNIX

All devices are represented by files called special files that are located in/dev directory. Thus, device files and other files are named and accessed in the same way. A ‘regular file’ is just an ordinary data file in the disk. A ‘block special file’ represents a device with characteristics similar to a disk (data transfer in terms of blocks). A ‘character special file’ represents a device with characteristics similar to a keyboard (data transfer is by stream of bits in sequential order).

All UNIX files have its description stored in a structure called ‘inode’. The inode contains info about the file-size, its location, time of last access, time of last modification, permission and so on. Directories are also represented as files and have an associated inode. In addition to descriptions about the file, the inode contains pointers to the data blocks of the file. If the file is large, inode has indirect pointer to a block of pointers to additional data blocks (this further aggregates for larger files). A block is typically 8k.

Inode consists of the following fields:

A Unix directory is a file containing a correspondence between filenames and inodes. A directory is a special file that the kernel maintains. Only kernel modifies directories, but processes can read directories. The contents of a directory are a list of filename and inode number pairs. When new directories are created, kernel makes two entries named ‘.’ (refers to the directory itself) and ‘..’ (refers to parent directory).

System call for creating directory is mkdir (pathname, mode).

The difference between fcntl anf ioctl is that the former is intended for any open file, while the latter is for device-specific operations.

Every file has following attributes:

‘r w x -r w x- r w x’

(user permission-group permission-others permission)

r-read, w-write, x-execute

To change the access mode, we use chmod(filename,mode).

Example 1:

To change mode of myfile to ‘rw-rw-r–’ (ie. read, write permission for user – read,write permission for group – only read permission for others) we give the args as:

chmod(myfile,0664) .

Each operation is represented by discrete values

‘r’ is 4

‘w’ is 2

‘x’ is 1

Therefore, for ‘rw’ the value is 6(4+2).

Example 2:

To change mode of myfile to ‘rwxr–r–’ we give the args as:

chmod(myfile,0744).

A link is a second name (not a file) for a file. Links can be used to assign more than one name to a file, but cannot be used to assign a directory more than one name or link filenames on different computers.

Symbolic link ‘is’ a file that only contains the name of another file.Operation on the symbolic link is directed to the file pointed by the it.Both the limitations of links are eliminated in symbolic links.

Commands for linking files are:

Link ln filename1 filename2

Symbolic link ln -s filename1 filename2

FIFO are otherwise called as ‘named pipes’. FIFO (first-in-first-out) is a special file which is said to be data transient. Once data is read from named pipe, it cannot be read again. Also, data can be read only in the order written. It is used in interprocess communication where a process writes to one end of the pipe (producer) and the other reads from the other end (consumer).

The system call mknod creates special files in the following sequence.

For example:

If the device is a disk, major device number refers to the disk controller and minor device number is the disk.